


Like Nothing Else

by atlanticslide



Category: Unter Uns
Genre: M/M, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 08:11:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14015991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlanticslide/pseuds/atlanticslide
Summary: This thing between them still feels fragile, and the misery of the last few weeks is still so fresh in his mind, but he wants this to be something real.  Their first try had felt breathlessly wonderful in the moment, but now he knows that there were things missing that he needs in order for this to really work.





	Like Nothing Else

The rest of the night after returning home from the train station is spent in bed.

“It’s still so strange, you know?” Easy murmurs around the time that dawn is peeking through the window shades and they’re both too exhausted to do more than lie beside one another, touching softly, but also too keyed up to actually sleep yet.

“What is?” Ringo replies. His eyes are closed but he’s still very much awake, one of his hands stroking gently up and down Easy’s arm, his shoulder, his shoulder blade. 

“Touching you.” Easy rubs his thumb back and forth over Ringo’s arm. “Seeing you naked.”

Ringo opens one eye at that and gives him a long look that’s probably intended to be cold but just makes Easy laugh.

“I can go somewhere else if you’d prefer,” Ringo replies dryly, withdrawing his hand. Easy catches it before he can get to far.

“Don’t you dare.” He pulls Ringo back in with a smile, and marvels at the look of helplessness on Ringo’s face, open and wanting as Easy grins at him, and then leans in to kiss him. 

“As if I would,” Ringo says against Easy’s lips.

“We could’ve been doing this for years,” Easy mumbles in between kisses. And that’s the thing that’s so strange - he _loves_ Ringo, like something burning through his body and happily consuming him, but before a few months ago he could never have imagined wanting to hold Ringo, to fuck him, to touch him, to whisper softly against his skin. If Ringo had moved to Italy a year ago, Easy would’ve been happy to see the back of him; yesterday, he’d been desperate to make him stay. 

Regardless of how they’ve felt through the past few years, Easy knows what he wants right now (mostly to push Ringo onto his back and press him into the mattress), but it’s still so hard to reconcile how he’d felt before with the emotions flooding through him now. He wonders vaguely, as Ringo moves to press his mouth against Easy’s neck, if the last few years have just been foreplay, building up to bring them to this moment. 

But mixed in with the desire, the bloom of love, the comfort he feels at having Ringo back in his arms, there’s still a hint of doubt that feels like a pinprick in the back of his mind. Ringo lets out a warm breath against his collarbone and Easy’s mind drifts a bit, thinking about whether all of this, the two of them together, was inevitable, regardless of Ringo’s machinations. And it doesn’t really matter - they’re here now, and Easy trusts Ringo’s love as much as he trusts his own. 

Still, he pulls back from Ringo’s wandering mouth and shuffles a bit on the bed so that he can look Ringo in the eye.

“Stop for a moment,” he says gently when Ringo tries to close the gap between them, putting a hand to Ringo’s chest. Ringo flops back to the bed with a grumble that makes Easy smile.

But he quickly grows serious and looks away from Ringo’s eyes, down at his own hand resting against Ringo’s chest.

“I need to ask you something,” he says, stomach twisting a little. It’s funny how nervous Ringo can make him. It never used to be that way.

“What?” Ringo runs his hand down Easy’s arm, squeezes his elbow.

“I, um,” Easy begins, unsure quite how to say it. “I need you to tell me everything. Everything that you did.”

Ringo goes rigid at that, pulls back like he might actually be pulling away, and Easy moves to grip his side, keep him in place. 

“Easy…”

This thing between them still feels fragile, and the misery of the last few weeks is still so fresh in his mind, but he wants this to be something real. Their first try had felt breathlessly wonderful in the moment, but now he knows that there were things missing that he needs in order for this to really work.

He says the latter out loud, looks back up at Ringo and tells him that they need to really be honest with each other.

Ringo turns his head up to stare awkwardly at the ceiling for a moment before saying, his voice tight, “I thought - I thought we were past this. Everything’s in the past.”

“It is,” Easy replies, brushing his thumb back and forth over Ringo’s abdomen and still trying to make sure he doesn’t pull away. “It is in the past, and that’s where I want it to stay. I know you love me, that’s not what I’m asking.” He pauses for a moment, trying to find the right words. “It’s that I don’t want to always be wondering what was real and what was you…” he trails off, the words _manipulating me_ stuck in his throat.

He gives Ringo a small shake, forces Ringo’s eyes to meet his own. “I need you to be honest with me.”

Ringo sighs heavily. “It’s all sort of blurry now. Things that started as manipulation became real, it's hard to sort it out exactly.” He looks pained, and Easy’s mind flicks back to that day, outside the Schiller, Ringo trying to tell him something and looking so pained with it. Easy spent days afterwards pouring over the last few months in his head, trying to catalog every interaction they’d had and what it had meant, what was genuine between them and what was just Ringo buttering him up to get to his properties, which of his strange luck over the past months was just that and which was fueled by Ringo.

He takes a long breath, tries not to give into his impulse to look away. “The fire. I know I didn’t leave the coffee machine or the boiler on. It wasn’t kids trying to stir trouble though, was it?”

Ringo looks away. Easy can feel the tension radiating from him like waves. He squeezes Ringo’s side, can’t quite find the words to say _it’s okay_ , because it’s not, really. It’s terrible. But at the same time it doesn’t really change anything now, and he believes it that it’s firmly in the past.

So he nods and runs his hand around to press against Ringo’s back, unsure what he can really say.

“If anything had happened to you,” Ringo tells him, rolling onto his side and looking back down to meet Easy’s eyes again, his expression grave. “I would never have forgiven myself. Please know that.”

He does know that, but he doesn’t respond. Instead he rubs his hand across Ringo’s back, tries to smooth some of the tension there, and asks, “Is there anything else that I don’t know?”

Ringo’s quiet for long enough that it’s a clear _yes_. When he closes his eyes, Easy’s pretty sure that whatever it is is somehow worse than setting the kiosk on fire, and he’s suddenly not so sure that he wants to know. 

Easy shuffles a bit, wrestles with himself over whether to take Ringo’s hand. Ringo opens his eyes but can’t quite seem to bring himself to look at Easy.

“I… when we went to the doctor, you and I…” he begins, fumbling uncharacteristically for words. “When I thought that I might have HIV and was taking PEP…”

Easy waits for a moment for him to elaborate, stares at Ringo’s eyes darting quickly from Easy and then away, before realization dawns on him.

“You didn’t actually forget to use a condom that night, did you?”

“I didn’t even sleep with anyone that night,” Ringo confesses, and after all of the things that he’s revealed in the last few weeks, this is one of the bigger punches to the gut.

He looks away then, down at the sheets between them. They’re both very, very still, as if they’re each afraid to make a move that might scare the other one off. Easy’s stomach is churning and he sort of both wants to push himself away from Ringo and pull Ringo in closer so that he can press himself into Ringo’s neck and breathe him in. He can’t remember the last time anyone made him feel so in love and so conflicted. 

After a long moment of silence, Easy asks, carefully, afraid to know the answer, “Were you laughing at me all that time? Taking care of you when you weren’t actually sick?”

He looks up to find Ringo staring with that pained expression again, his brow deeply furrowed. He doesn’t answer right away, considering for a long moment. 

“I knew that you’d react that way, taking care of me,” Ringo tells him, his voice tight. “Everything I did, I did it because…” He sighs and pauses, starts again. “You’re kind and you’re trusting - way too kind for your own good. I knew that, and I knew that if I told you I was in trouble that you’d help me, so I did. And you acted exactly as I predicted.”

Easy appreciates the blunt honesty, but it’s hard to hear it laid out so clearly, even if he was the one who asked for it. 

“What I didn’t predict,” Ringo goes on, softer now and flicking his eyes back up to meet Easy’s. “Is how it would make me feel. To have you care about me.”

His chest is tight, and now he does pull Ringo in closer. It could all be lies and platitudes, but he knows that it’s not. Ringo loving him doesn’t make any of it okay, but it’s perhaps easier to understand it all now, knowing this.

Ringo butts his head up against Easy’s and sighs, his breath ghosting across Easy’s lips. “I hated you. I thought it wouldn’t matter, hurting you. I thought I wouldn’t care. I think it’d be easier, maybe, if I still hated you. But when you smile at me, it makes me feel like…” He sighs and cuts himself off with a grumble, rolling away from Easy to lie on his back. “Shit. I’m not good at any of this.” 

“You’re doing okay,” Easy tells him gently, laying a hand on Ringo’s chest. He nudges their legs together so they’re tangled up and pressed skin to skin. Ringo looks back at him, and Easy takes a moment to lean down and kiss him.

“I don’t really get it either, you know?” Ringo says after a moment, shaking his head awkwardly. “Any other time when someone pisses me off or rejects me or… whatever else. I just want to hurt them.” He looks back at Easy, and Easy reaches up to brush his thumb across Ringo’s cheek. “With you, these last few weeks, all I wanted was for you to stop hurting.”

It feels like as much a declaration of something as anything else Ringo’s said to him recently, and Easy has to kiss him again, moaning a little into it as Ringo wraps his arms around Easy’s back. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone like I love you either,” Easy tells him when he pulls away just a bit, whispers the words across Ringo’s lips and keeps their foreheads pressed together. It’s true, that deep ache of desperate love still pouring over him even as they pick at the scab of the past few weeks. He wonders if perhaps exposing it all like a fresh wound will serve to make them stronger in the end. Right now, he can’t imagine ever letting Ringo go again, even knowing now everything that he does. 

Easy pulls back enough to settle himself against Ringo’s chest, his arms folded under his chin so that he can rest his weight on Ringo and stare at him as they trade soft smiles between them. 

A thought occurs to him then. “Did you actually take all of those PEP pills?” He thinks of how pale and clammy Ringo had been, how awful those pills can be, and has trouble imagining Ringo actually putting himself through that intentionally.

Ringo looks up at the ceiling, runs his hands up and down Easy’s back and doesn’t actually give much of an answer beyond “eh…”

It’s not funny, but Easy shakes his head with a barely repressed smile anyway. “Oh god, I’m in love with a psycho,” he says, without anger. 

Ringo rolls his eyes before looking back at Easy and telling him, “you’re an asshole,” his voice full of warmth. 

Then he says, “I have one more confession.”

Easy stills, looks at him expectantly. Ringo brings one hand up to smooth his knuckles across Easy’s cheek. 

“I hate the kiosk.” 

Easy shakes his head and presses up to kiss him again.


End file.
